1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a computer-implemented method for managing at least one data element in control unit development.
2. Description of the Background Art
Methods for managing data elements are known from various technical development sectors, and are used primarily in technical products whose development goes through several stages, wherein multiple developers or development groups taking part in the development have different views of the product and the data elements associated with the product, depending on their area of responsibility.
Control units can be understood to mean robust microcomputers which are presently typically provided for industrial use and which usually have integrated I/O interfaces. Programs which in the broadest sense connect via the I/O interface to a technical process to be controlled and act on this process in a desired manner are frequently executed on control units which are equipped with a real-time operating system. Control units of the described type are used extensively in the automotive field, for example. In the meantime, the development of control units has become an important element in the development of mass-produced vehicles.
Control unit development may be classified into various areas in which different data elements of interest are typically processed. The beginning of the control unit development includes, for example, the area of requirement specifications and the area of test cases for testing the various requirements. These are followed by the area of test system descriptions, for example in the form of a hardware description of a hardware-in-the-loop test system, the area of mathematical models for simulating the control unit environment, or the area of parameter sets and signals for parameterizing the models; the listing is by way of example and may be freely expanded. It is readily apparent that in the various areas of control unit development, various contents in the form of the data elements are processed by different developers, and also should be processed only by them. In the prior art it is presently customary to perform the management of the data elements via control unit development in various development environments. For example, the requirement specifications are processed and managed in a different software environment than the software which is developed for various target control units.
It would be desirable to manage data elements using a uniform computer-implemented method via the overall process of the control unit development, so that different development environments do not have to be used for managing data elements. Accordingly, the object of the present invention is to provide a computer-implemented method of this type.
In the computer-implemented method described at the outset for managing at least one data element in control unit development, the object formulated and presented above is achieved by providing at least one management unit having a user interface, associating the data element with the management unit, and associating an access configuration with the management unit, the access configuration defining the accessibility of the data element by a user via the user interface.
The management unit is thus a program-based repository for the data elements associated with it, the user interface associated with the management unit ensuring the basic possibility for accessing the data elements contained in the management unit. In the access configuration, the type and/or the extent of the possibility for accessing the data element is/are defined by the user via the user interface. The configuration of the management unit according to the invention allows the accessibility of the contained data elements to be controlled by the users.